My art made by the others

03/09/2008

Gabriel Orozco v/s Markus Hofer

Gabriel Orozco creates lyrical works in sculpture, drawing, photography, installation, and video—mediums as diverse as the issues that Orozco's art engenders and explores: how the random and mundane create meaning, the construction of space and time, the mutability of forms. Many of his sculptures are made from found objects, like a deflated soccer ball, a chess board and game pieces, and a trisected and reassembled Citroen automobile. This dialogue with the readymade continues in Orozco's photographs, which document chance encounters with sites and things in his native Mexico and other locations around the world, including India, Iceland, and New York. The artist frequently intervenes in what he discovers, arranging found materials and photographing his

constructions. Sometimes, he transforms the ordinary just by the act of naming, as he does with titles such as Pulpo (Octopus, 1991) which bestows a symbolic, associative meaning onto a tangle of pipes, and Dos parejas (Two Couples, 1990) which anthropomorphizes pairs of clay vases. Another photo appears to be of a cloud-streaked sky, but it is actually a reflection captured in a puddle (Pelota en agua [Ball on Water, 1994]).Recording his movements and artistic activities, Orozco's photographs also serve as poetic markers of the simple but essential relationship between objects and bodies.

“Looking through the lens of the camera doesn't intensify ex

perience. It just frames the object. It's much more intense without the camera. For me photography is like a shoebox. You put things in a box when you want to keep them, to think about them. Photography is more than a window for me; photography is more like a space that tries to capture situations. It's notational. I use the camera like drawing.”

— Gabriel Orozco